Spies and Commissars: The Bolshevik Revolution and the West (39 page)

The labour movements in Europe remained an obstacle to such efforts since dockers were militantly opposed to British and French
assistance to the anti-Bolshevik armies. Germany was another potential source of supplies for the Whites; its military equipment was cheap after the Great War and there was plenty of it on sale. But German workers persistently held up such exports to Russia and Ukraine.
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As it happened, this mattered less to Denikin than to other White armies because he could buy material channelled clandestinely through Salonika and Alexandria where no trade union was likely to hold things up.
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One crucial piece of assistance came free of charge: Western intelligence reports. After the Allies withdrew their diplomatic corps from Russia they usually relocated their espionage networks to wherever the White military headquarters were operating at the time, whether in southern Russia, mid-Siberia or Estonia. The British with their immense empire had established the world’s most comprehensive cable system and could tap into almost any message whenever they wanted.
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Allied and White networks shared a lot of the information they were gathering. Denikin could rely on being told what the French and British military missions learned from their capitals and from their own secret agencies in Russia and Ukraine.
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Yudenich too obtained material from ministries in Paris and London.
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He received information of high quality about the political and social situation in Russia and Ukraine,
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and he usually got the data he needed on the latest deployments and appointments in the Red Army.
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And although the commanders of the Whites – Kolchak, Denikin, Yudenich and Miller – had their disputes, they did not let them escalate to the point of disrupting each other’s military operations. Each White army used its team of radio telegraphists to keep the others informed of their plans, and Sazonov in Paris was also included in the exchange of telegrams.
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The Whites conducted a deep surveillance of planning and conditions in the Red Army. Denikin’s agency was called Azbuka (or ABC). Its operatives received a wide licence from him for its spying activity – they even kept an informant inside the National Centre despite the fact that it was firmly allied to his Volunteer Army. Azbuka’s penetration of Ukraine had been deep ever since 1918;
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and as the Volunteer Army grew in strength, the agency increased its geographical range and reported in detail on what Russia’s workers thought about the Bolsheviks and on how the peasants were reacting to Soviet rule.
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In 1918, the technical specialists working for Azbuka had often even succeeded in intercepting conversations between
Bolshevik leaders on the Hughes telegraph apparatus;
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they had also been well informed about exchanges between the Germans and the Soviet authorities.
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In 1919 they regularly picked up Moscow’s confidential news broadcasts to local Bolshevik administrations across Russia and caught Soviet messages going to and from European radio stations.
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Nonetheless these advantages in intelligence and equipment did Yudenich no good when he started his offensive in October 1919. Kolchak was fleeing eastwards through Siberia with his beaten army; Denikin was hastily withdrawing to the Ukrainian south. The Red Army was free to concentrate on the military threat emerging from Estonia. And even though Zinoviev, the Bolshevik leader in Petrograd, began to panic, the Politburo in Moscow reacted swiftly. Trotsky and Stalin were dispatched to head the political co-ordination of defence. Stern measures were taken against the middle classes across the city. A preventive terror was organized. Stalin ordered that formerly wealthy citizens should be paraded in a line in front of the Red defences so that they would be the first to be hit by the artillery fire of the North-Western Army. Trotsky travelled away from the city outskirts and saw military action while stiffening the resolve of his troops and commanders.
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As the Whites advanced from Estonia into Russia, they gave a good account of themselves and for a few days the battle for Petrograd lay in the balance. But the Red Army had the resources and experience it needed. Yudenich’s offensive collapsed and he was quickly forced into retreat with his men and equipment.

A young Russian observed them as they streamed back towards Estonian territory:

We saw a vast column on the move. They had arrived by the same branch line as us and disembarked at the same place. There were at least 2000 of them, wearing British greatcoats and accompanied by light artillery and machine guns. Obviously something was wrong at the front, and either the Reds had broken through it or outflanked it at Luga. The rumour was that Pskov too was about to surrender.
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The rumour was all too true; and although the Civil War was not yet over in the old borderlands, Russia itself was firmly in the hands of the communists. Bolshevik celebrations in Petrograd and Moscow were long and vigorous.

21. WESTERN AGENTS

The Allied intelligence agents operating in Russia had worked long and hard to prevent the Red victory. None of them failed to appreciate the shortcomings of the Whites; indeed their reports frequently highlighted the urgent need for the White commanders to improve their military potential by paying greater attention to the political and social concerns of people living in the zones they occupied. Western espionage and subversion were conducted in difficult conditions – and the absence of normal diplomatic relations between Soviet Russia and the Allies meant that they had to be imaginative in their activities.

Agents operated in a wide variety of guises. At one end of it, there was the spy Sidney Reilly, who gathered information illicitly and co-organized a plot to overthrow communist rule. Robert Bruce Lockhart, his superior, had covertly initiated that conspiracy while working openly for the British government and enjoying something like official accreditation from the Kremlin. The Allied powers also sent military missions that secretly paid Russians to gather intelligence and carry out subversion. Jean Lavergne busied himself in this way for the French. But military missions were always suspect to the Bolsheviks, and the Allies had to turn to less formal agents for contact with the communist leadership. Raymond Robins of the American Red Cross was the US embassy’s main intermediary. He was an American patriot who sincerely believed that a rapprochement between the US and Lenin’s Russia was in the interests of both countries. The British reporter Arthur Ransome, a Secret Service Bureau informant, shared this conviction; he warmed to the Bolsheviks while rejecting the idea of transplanting their ideas and system to Britain. And the French embassy made similar use of Jacques Sadoul before deciding that he was more trouble than he was worth when he identified himself unconditionally with the Bolshevik cause.

The Lockhart Case was a breaking point for the Western agencies.
As even unconventional kinds of diplomacy were made impossible, the Allied embassies packed their bags and left Russia altogether; and the Bolshevik leaders, scarred by the experience of Lockhart’s trickery, became warier. Nonetheless Ransome continued to be made welcome on his visits and his reports to the British secret service on Kremlin politics retained their immediacy, whereas Robins never returned to Russia. Sadoul stayed in Moscow, but as a convicted deserter and traitor he lost direct contact with French public life.

The West’s intelligence networks quickly restored their operations after the damage done by the Cheka raids of September 1918, but it no longer made sense to keep Moscow or Petrograd as their main bases. Allied agents had already renounced any tendencies towards flamboyance. This came hard for a man like George Hill who liked to mix jollity with danger. On arrival in Russia in late summer 1917 he had spent evenings with young grand dukes in the Gypsy encampment at Strelnaya.
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He had a chum called Colonel Joe Boyle, a Canadian, who was a former US amateur heavyweight boxing champion and used his fists whenever provoked – or even just when he imagined that someone had tried to provoke him.
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Hill and Boyle disapproved of the October Revolution. But they offered their services to the Bolsheviks in getting the trains moving again around the Moscow regional network because the Western Allies still hoped to keep Russia in the war. Adolf Ioffe, who worked at that time in the Petrograd Soviet’s Military-Revolutionary Committee, gratefully signed personal affidavits for them – he overlooked the carping tone of Boyle’s insistence that they should be addressed by their military ranks rather than as Comrade Boyle and Comrade Hill.
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Their greatest escapade had involved them in transporting the Romanian gold reserve and crown jewels across Russia and Ukraine to Iasi in eastern Romania at the request of Ambassador Diamandy in December 1917. The Romanians had deposited them in Moscow for safekeeping in time of war. Boyle and Hill travelled down from Petrograd by train no. 451 in the carriage of the former empress.
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The valuables were held in the Russian state vaults, and permission to move them had to be obtained from Moscow’s military commandant Nikolai Muralov. Since it was a time when the Bolsheviks and the Allies were still trying to avoid a rupture, Muralov gave his consent. Boyle and Hill prudently packed the valuables into wicker baskets to avoid untoward attention as they moved the heavy load across Moscow to their waiting train. The next stage of the journey involved
a route through the lines of Russian and Ukrainian forces ranged against each other near Bryansk.
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No sooner had this danger been surmounted than the engine became caught in a snowdrift 120 miles north of Kiev. As if this was not bad enough, the crew was hit by shots fired by a Ukrainian army detachment which decided that they were Russian invaders – this was indeed a time of chaotic uncertainty. Boyle and Hill intervened to keep the train moving onwards to Kiev and some temporary safety before attempting the last stage of the journey to Romania.
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They used subterfuge and a degree of compulsion, including holding a gun to their driver’s head, as they left for the Ukrainian–Romanian border. Arriving at Iasi on 24 December after a trip of nine days they received the thanks of Prime Minister Ionel Bratianu. The King bestowed the Grand Cross of the Crown of Romania on Boyle and the Order of the Star of Romania on Hill.
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Returning to Moscow, Hill lived a double life after the Brest-Litovsk treaty. While helping Trotsky to set up a Soviet air force, he established a secret network of informants and couriers across Russia and Ukraine.
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He also liaised with Savinkov.
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In the same weeks he sponsored and led irregular units in night raids on German army camps on Ukrainian territory. Hill blew up gasometers in towns where the Germans were garrisoned – and he supervised the sabotage of coal mines by pouring sand into their pumping systems.
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When the nature of his activities came to the notice of the German secret service, it dispatched an agent to assassinate him at the Moscow Aviation Park. Hill spotted the danger at the last moment. He fought off the agent in an alleyway, leaving him with a bleeding head and triumphantly stealing his Mauser.
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The Germans made another attempt by putting a time bomb in his office. Hill’s sixth sense of jeopardy helped him and he got rid of the device before it exploded.
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Not all his couriers were as lucky. Two of them were discovered and executed on their way to Murmansk; a further six perished in another of his operations.
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After the Allies had seized Archangel, Hill heard that Trotsky had given the order for his arrest.
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He went undercover. Until then he had worn uniform but now he burned his English clothes. He had several young women working for him. He appreciated their skill in using ciphers and sewing messages into clothing – the messages were produced with the use of a dictionary and coding card. Hill kept a bottle of petrol within reach in case of a Cheka raid when he would
need to destroy evidence.
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Along with three of his women he rented premises as the supposed owner of a sewing business and assumed the false identity of George Bergmann, pretending to be a Russian of Baltic-German descent.
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For some days he stayed indoors to let his beard grow and told the neighbours he was recovering from a bout of malaria. Then he found a job at a cinematograph studio as a film developer. With a ginger beard and hands discoloured by chemicals, he could easily walk around Moscow unidentified. Regular employment entitled him to a ration card, which meant that he could get food without flaunting his money and attracting undesirable attention. The hours of work – from six in the evening till eleven at night – enabled him to work as a spy during the hours of daylight.
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The other bonus of the job was that he was able to view the latest official newsreels before release.
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